Jacob Clifton

This weekend may or may not be all about The Killing for you but at our house, that is what's happening. Otherwise you have more Syfy bullshit movies, the end of a Malkovich era, lots of finales and premieres, and Oprah's endless search for musicians Brandy and Paul Stanley.

FRIDAY

At
8/7c. there's a new season of Masters of Illusion on the CW, for those of us who like to pretend magical feats are real, and on Girl Meets World, girl meets the truth. At 9/8c. you have the second season premiere of Gravity Falls on Disney, or a show on the Travel Channel proceeding from the premise that two Monumental Mysteries equally in need of solving are 1) Who killed Huey Long and 2) "Superman vs. the KKK." (What's the mystery? "Which one is cooler?")

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Then at 10/9c. it's "A Demon's Revenge" on the season premiere of DA's A Haunting; H2 goes In Search Of Aliens but in this case specifically the "Nazi Time Travelers" kind of aliens. Which, did you even know that is a kind of alien? TLC has a special on Curvy Brides (guessing they're pro, just a hunch) and Ralph Nader is on Real Time with Bill Maher.

SATURDAY

At
8/7c. there's the two-hour finale of NBC's Crossbones, and that's about it. But at 9/8c. there's something on BBC America that could be super awesome or could be really lame: The Great Martian War, an alternate-history documentary that seems to be asking, "What if the War of the Worlds hoax had been true?" Like, up to how the world would be now if the aliens came when everybody thought they did. (Me, I think media trolling would still have been invented, but maybe not for decades. Definitely we still would have ended up with Sharknado, so I guess some time before the 90s. There's no timeline, even in infinity, where Generation X never happened.)

There's also at this time
Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda in case your irony meter is just that janky that you think that's what having fun is like, the finale of Power on Starz, and the premiere of Hell On Wheels on AMC, apparently this is its fourth season, which is an impressively long time for a show to be on a prestige network and still to have no idea what it is about. Is it about trains or am I thinking of True Detective? (Or China Miéville? Maybe it's not even about trains, maybe Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda is throwing me off and I just think everything is China Miéville books now. What a dreary fucking world that would be.)

At
10/9c. there's Life with La Toya and on Travel Channel, a show called Dead Files that will apparently be investigating the "Demon War" in... Toledo, Ohio. Dear Travel Channel: It's hard to have sympathy when I see you doing this to yourself. I mean first of all Toledo doesn't even exist, so maybe leave that shit to Syfy.

SUNDAY

At
4/3c. in the afternoon, ABC will be airing the last two episodes of its spy drama The Assets, which is certainly a decision.

At
7/6c. there's a one-hour special on NBC about Wrestlemania? I feel like we're just following Brian Williams's lead at this point. And he's following Anderson Cooper, who is kind of turning into Andy Cohen, who is kind of turning into Dick Cheney. So you see what I'm saying.

At
8/7c., there's a very exciting Big Brother where we learn who won HOH after Julie wasted all that time on that dumb HOH game, and let me tell you it's phenomenal. PBS has the finales of Last Tango In Halifax and Vicious, which I plan on watching in September as I feel the weather better suits it. There's Baseball and pre-season Football, which probably you're already aware of that if you care enough to care about it now.

Wipeout references the Bachelors and Bachelorettes and I guess is pitting them against each other and I guess one way or the other we can finally stop messing around with feminism by the end of Sunday's episode of Wipeout. Nat Geo Wild is a network on some people's TVs and tonight it is all about their new show Urban Jungle, which is about tits because that's all it's about, at this point in history. And finally, the Real Housewives of New Jersey have gone ahead and called their next episode "A Hairy Situation," which is not helpful because thanks for narrowing down what situation we're talking about.

At
9/8c. on the Travel Channel there is a show about politics and fine dining and the life of the polymath called Bikinis & Boardwalks. Food Network Star is on also. If I watched reality shows I would really love that one, I think. It's about the parts of food that are not boring to me: Being super fake, having a personal brand, never having emotions inside yourself, thinking fast on your feet. Nothing tastes as good as poise, and a sociopathic control over your own affect, feels.

The Musketeers meet "A Rebellious Woman" whom I'm just praying is neither Maggie Gyllenhaal nor Juno Temple, my greatest nemeses; Long Island Medium continues to boldly and baldly lie about who the fuck and what the fuck she is for the sixth straight season; Stan Lee's Superhumans exists and tonight features a Powerlifting Pastor, which is everything in my world; and Hercule Poirot ends his twelfth season of solving mysteries.

Oprah meanwhile continues her own tradition of mystery solving, this time looking into
Where Now Are: Brandy, Nikki Taylor, Paul Stanley and Lorenzo Lamas. I don't know where they are now but I can tell you it's probably not all in the same place. But if it is, I hope she found them by accident, doing shots at like a Chili's or something, talking about all the many, many things they have in common. Oprah: Where Are They Now? is either heavily and wonderfully and complexly curated, I'm saying, or in fact is a celebration of its own randomness, but either way I don't really care where any of those particular people are now except for the whimsy of the sentence that contains them. (Where's Brandy? The past. I'm the future.)

"Excuse me, can I please talk to you for a minute?"
"Mmhmm, sure. You look kind of familiar."
"Yeah, you do too. But um, I just wanted to know, do you know somebody named... You know his name."
"Oh yeah definitely I know his name. It's Lorenzo Lamas. But I have no idea where he is."
"Let's ask Oprah."

At
10/9c. there's the hour-long second season premiere of e!'s attempt at... You know what, who cares. We don't need to talk about it. On TLC there's two episodes of the new show Escaping Alaska, which unless it's got Levi in it who cares. There's Manhattan, Masters of Sex, a Masterclass with Cicely Tyson, The Strain if you absolutely must, and the finale of Halt and Catch Fire. Me, I'll be watching my actual favorite television show, The Leftovers, and then probably John Oliver.